Inner light

I was delighted when cooler weather arrived last November. I had been looking forward to carrying my cup of hot, sweet tea up to the roof to sit there and dream in the fresh cool breeze.

At 26 degrees, though, it is just more summer without the humidity.

As my foreign friends like to say, it is what it is. Reconciled to the reality of what it is, and since there are no forests in Dhaka for forest bathing, I go up to the roof with a glass of cool lemonade instead of hot tea, sit among the myriad plants that I have collected, and do plant bathing, while taking deep breaths of what I like to imagine is pure oxygen.

Face turned to the sky, I lean back and enjoy the feeling of just being alive. The birds chirp, parrots fly past and a breeze stirs gently in the palms.

The hours pass peacefully, while the mind has time to wander its streets of memory. The by-lanes and alleyways of the heart are filled with colourful images from both past and present, which have a life of their own. As many writers have demonstrated already, the past, experienced in retrospect, takes on extra beauty.

Proust wrote of the power of past joy and memory in five volumes. I remember clearly even today, among his beautiful pages,  his eloquent and beautiful description of great arcades of pink hawthorn near his local church; every image made all the more vivid for him because he wrote his master work (Remembrance of Things Past) many years later.

While thinking of Proust, and admiring the subtle tints of light moving gently from morning to evening, as the white of noon shifts to blue, lavender, coral and rose, another memory comes to mind: that of Lawrence Durrell writing in his Alexandria Quartet not only of the bustle and red dust of his beloved city, but also of the "light filtered through the essence of lemons".

We all dream of expressing with facility the light and stars hiding in our hearts: for example, I wish I could have written these long-gone poignant words of T E Lawrence: "I loved you, so I drew these tides of Men into my hands, and wrote my will across the sky and stars to earn you freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house."

Although we cannot all be a Monet, a Keats, a Kibria, or a Kalidas Karmakar, our appreciation of beauty and our own small creative contributions to that world have value, not least because they have been shaped by events that are particular to us. Love, loss, joy, and sadness have helped form us, and have given our personae the unique dimension that makes each one of us so special.

We each of us carry within ourselves a hidden trove of artistic, emotional and spiritual feeling. We too live our days in vivid colour through the lens of our own perceptions. We lack only the ability to shape our visions into tangible forms.

When we experience great art in all its forms, we rejoice because it is a reflection of our own inner light, the essence of what is purest and most beautiful inside ourselves.